Stop 9 - Dijon

Today leaving Grenoble, we headed out for Lyon and then on to Dijon.  This is the Burgundy Region of France now.

Travelling today was much easier, no windy narrow roads to negotiate.  We arrived in Lyon around 10:30 am. This is where our guide Marie Claire lives, so her knowledge of this area was a great help for us getting around.  We drove up a steep hill to a very ornate and attractive Roman Catholic Basilica. This one had gold paintings on the walls and was just beautiful, as most of them are.  This particular Church is not used for Weddings, Funerals etc. Just for services.  Just outside the back of this basilica were lovely views over the town below. The town seems quite big, and has the usual lovely buildings to observe. We did a bit of a walk around the older part of the town and then had time to explore on our own.  We decided to walk over one of the 29 bridges in Lyon, and wandered through the Fruit and vegie market which also had a fair amount of cheeses and unusual meats for sale as well. It was all very pleasant. We got ourselves some bananas and apricots for our lunch and sat by the river and ate them. Lyon has 2 Rivers, the Rhone and the Soane, one of these flowing down from Switzerland, so I guess the 29 Bridges are spread over the two Rivers. Lyon is well known for it’s silk industry and now also Chemical industries. We enjoyed our walk around the town.

Then it was on to Dijon. We arrived here around 4 pm and had awhile to wander and discover this lovely town. It seems quite big. Just for a change, the streets aren’t all narrow. They do however still have a lot of cobblestone streets. These can be a bit difficult to walk on. We had a bit of a walking tour with our guide and then we were on our own.  The roofs of some of the older buildings have an unique pattern to them which is known as the Burgundy style. Usually these colours reflect the colours of the towns industries. E g. the burgundy colour for the wines which are made here, yellow for the mustard. There are many grand buildings here and lots of modern shops. Gingerbread and a special blackcurrant liqueur as well as the mustards and the wines of course, seem to be the town’s popular fare.  This town has not always been part of France…that only happened in 471. Not sure whether it was originally part of Switzerland or Italy. Can’t remember everything Marie Claire tells us, there is so much detail in her guiding.  As soon as we got booked into our Hotel, it started to rain, so we were indeed lucky not to get wet this afternoon

Tomorrow is our last day on tour.  We are supposed to be catching “the very fast train” back to Paris, but it is a little bit up in the air as to whether the trains will be running, or on strike again.  We thought only Italy sprung train strikes at the drop of a hat….but, no, it seems. Should the trains indeed  be on strike, we will bus it back to Paris which will take 4 hours instead of 1 ½ hours.  So, we are hoping for the trains to be running of course. Also, if the Taxis strike again on Saturday morning we could be in a bit of a bind to get to the airport to fly to Bucharest, so, we will keep our fingers crossed.  We may be out of touch for a couple of days, so….until we got back to having wifi, take care. We have really enjoyed our travels here in France.  Everything we’ve seen and everywhere we’ve been has been just lovely. We certainly know a lot more about France now than we did before we got here. We never realised it was such a big country either.